Philosophers from around the world will gather in Athens from Aug. 4-10, returning to the land of its most famous practitioners, for the World Congress of Philosophy.
The president of the Organizing Committee, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Athens Konstantinos Voudouris said the event is an important one for Greece during its crushing economic crisis.
The World Congress of Philosophy is organized every five years by the International Federation of Philosophical Societies in collaboration with one of its member societies. The 23rd Congress this year is being held under the auspices of the Hellenic Organizing Committee, which has been constituted by the Greek Philosophical Society.
Voudouris underlined that is was also the subject of the congress Philosophy as Inquiry and Way of Life that constituted a pole of attraction for the distinguished scientists of philosophy who will be present as will be scientists from Asia, where the philosophical theory differs in many points from the western philosophy. “A Chinese colleague contacted me to say how much interesting he found the subject of the congress,” Voudouris said.
The Congress, with the permission of the Ministry of Culture, has arranged to hold a number of events in the areas of Plato’s Academy; Aristotle’s Lyceum; the Pnyx (the meeting place of the ancient Athenian Parliament), which is itself located right across from the Acropolis; and at the site where Plato’s Phaedrus took place, within the environs of the present day Church of Hagia Photine on the Ilisus river.
The Congress participants will have the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to not only visit these sites passively, as is usually the case, but be an active part of the historical tradition of discourse, philosophical and political, that was cultivated within these areas.
Among the 3,000 congress participants from 105 countries who will come to Athens will be Jürgen Habermas and Uberto Eco. The opening of the WCP will be followed by a concert at Irodion with classic works that have a Greek subject, as well as with works of Manos Hatzidakis and Mikis Theodorakis.
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